


A Pragmatist Lost

by terri_testing



Category: Paradises Lost - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-12
Updated: 2015-11-12
Packaged: 2018-04-30 18:59:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5176079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/terri_testing/pseuds/terri_testing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“When the ship left, the nine hundred and four people on the planet had chosen to be there.  To die there.  Some of them had already died there.”<br/>Ursula K. LeGuin, “Paradises Lost”</p><p> </p><p>The other three thousand-odd people had chosen to fly blindly onward aboard the ship.</p><p>To die there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Pragmatist Lost

A nonprofit tribute to Ursula K. LeGuin’s novella “Paradises Lost” in the collection, The Birthday of the World. All quotes (italicized) are from that work.

 

****

No Year. The Voyage is Eternal.

(What would have been Year 184, had there still been years)

 

 _“I want to live my life in peace,”_ Bingdi had told Luis. _“Doing no harm and receiving no harm.”_

Was that such a terrible thing to have wanted? Bingdi wondered hazily, retching.

It wasn’t as though that had been a lie. He had never lied to Luis.

Misled, yes, but never lied.

Every word Bingdi had ever said to Luis had been the truth.

It wasn’t his fault that the angels weren’t the only ones who heard only what they wished to.

He had always told Luis the truth. Always.

Eyes full of visions, it had sometimes seemed to Bingdi, could be blind to other things.

 

Bingdi’s own vision was blurring, but he could see that the flashing pipes now shone wet red.

And there was still shouting, but he could no longer make out the words.

The next blow was to his head, and the world went black.

****

 

Luis’s Discovery. Year 163, Day 187 (approaching the planet)

 

“Next, Bingdi, we’ll need to work on persuading the Voyagers to extend the time the ship stays in orbit around the planet.” Luis flung himself before his comconsole in their sharespace and started keying even as he spoke. “The longer the ship stays, the better chance the colony has of making a good start. And it’s the Voyagers who’ll be the key to that decision. We’ll tell the angels they’re giving people more time to change their minds, we’ll point out to the scientists that we should take least a full revolution to assess the planet and the site….”

Luis split the screen and started scrolling, dictating names and notes. “Hmm—she’s Chi-An, I’ll let you handle most of those…. Lena works with him… a doctor, I’ll take the medical personnel, I’ll point out that lives may be saved by maintaining access to the ship’s resources ….”

Bingdi waited, his hands oddly cold, for Luis to approach the end of the list.

What was particularly annoying was, Bingdi’s Declaration had been sitting there on the innet for over fourteen tendays, had Luis ever bothered to look.

But he hadn’t. Because of course Bingdi would follow Luis. Into the Turd Group conspiracy, into a revolution, onto a fucking dirtball. Anywhere.

What else did Bingdi exist for?

Finally Luis stiffened and yelped, “5-Tan? On the **Voyager** list? Bingdi, is this some kind of joke?”

_“No. I don’t intend to leave the ship.”_

Luis protested, _“You don’t?”_

Bingdi paused, gathered himself. _“I never did. Why?”_

It was Luis’s turn to pause, bewildered that the question could be asked. _“You aren’t an angel.”_

 _“Of course not. I’m a pragmatist.”_   Utterly true, after all. Bingdi almost smiled.

Luis stammered, _“But you’ve worked so hard to keep the… the way out open.”_

 _“Of course,”_   Bingdi said.  But not, of course what. Instead, he continued, blandly, “ _I don’t like quarrels, divisions, enforced choices. They spoil the quality of life.”_

True, utterly true; anyone who knew him could attest to that.

Irrelevant but true.

Luis tried a new line of argument. _“You aren’t curious?”_

Ha! **That** was easily answered.

_“No. If I want to know what living on a planet surface is like, I can watch the training videos and holos. And read all the books in the Library about Old Earth. But why do I want to know what living on a planet is like? I live here. And I like it. I like what I know and I know what I like.”_

_Luis continued to look appalled._

His expression lured Bingdi into defending his choice, though he knew he shouldn’t.

_“You have a sense of duty. Ancestral duty—go find a new world… Scientific duty—go find new knowledge… If a door opens, you feel it’s your duty to go through it. If a door opens, I unquestioningly close it. If life is good, I don’t seek to change it.”_

True, all true.

 _“Life is good, Luis. I will miss you and a lot of other people,”_ Bingdi said.

True, utterly true.

 _“I’ll get bored with the angels.”_ Probably true.

_“You won’t be bored, down on that dirtball. But I have no sense of duty, and I rather enjoy being bored. I want to live my life in peace, doing no harm and receiving no harm. And judging by the films and books I think this may be the best place, in all the universe, to live such a life.”_

All true.

His friend brooded for a moment.

_“It’s a matter of control, finally, isn’t it,” Luis said._

And of what cannot be controlled, yes.

_Bingdi nodded. “We need to be in control, the angels and I. You don’t.”_

_“We aren’t in control. None of us. Ever.”_

Bingdi looked at the dark eyes bright with passion, at the dark flushed skin; Luis was urgent in his desire to persuade Bingdi to join him.

No, not to join him: to leave the ship forever for a planet.

Still, Bingdi gave Luis the truth. Or part of it. _“I know. But we’ve got a good imitation of it here. VR’s enough for me.”_

Since Virtual Reality was the only one on offer.

*

 

A Private Decision. Year 164, Day 123 (3 tendays after planetfall)

 

Tirza’s baby was dead. That dirtball killed with **light.** Could anything show more clearly that humans couldn’t hope to thrive there?

Bingdi had registered initially as a Voyager, because that was only sense. One didn’t need Luis’s sense of politics to figure out that if it came to a change of mind, it would be much, much better to be a ship person always sympathetic to the Outsiders who’d been persuaded at the last moment to join them, than to be a traitor to the ship’s faithful who’d decided at the last that he couldn’t bear the challenges posed by the planet. For over a year Bingdi had hugged to himself the knowledge that he might let himself change his mind when the time came actually to leave the planet and all the Outsiders behind.

But Tirza’s baby… the news of that death had closed his secret back door.

Hsin Ti Chiu killed with simple light. If Bingdi joined the Outsiders, it would only be to mourn for a little time at Luis’s recycling. Or in the hope that Luis would mourn at his.

There actually were works from the old world advocating such insanity, tagged romanctic fiction, tagged poetry, on the innet. The Lily Maid, Romeo and Juliet…. Maybe that’s what that Hsing liked, she used to be big on stuff like that. Calling herself a poet. If that Ti Chiu literature was serious, if love was supposed to mean that you would die to force your beloved to weep about your loss, or that dying beside him was better than living alone in comfort, then Bingdi wanted no part of dirtball love.

But if he was going to stay with the ship, really stay…. Bingdi punched his pillow. Not that he’d taken an interest in girls, more than a few times in the teenparties, experimenting. Confirming. But still he’d always assumed that of course he’d eventually have a fatherchild, one way or another. Either place.

Only he was committed now to the ship, and he knew that his shipmates had chosen to self-destruct in a few more generations. And it was wrong, knowing that, to create new generations, born only to be doomed.

It was fine for the angels, believing in some perfect eternal Voyage. Bingdi was a pragmatist, and **he** believed that in seven generations, the Unreplaceable Supplies would run out and the ship would assuredly fail. It would be wrong to engender some great-great-grandson only to doom him to suffocation in the dark.

Not that Luis had ever said anything like that. But Luis had said all he’d needed to, in choosing the lethal uncertainties of the dirtball over the delayed but certain doom of the voyagers.

And so Bingdi took himself, the next day, to the doctors. For a vasectomy.

He was staying.

*

 

A Democratic Decision. Year 164, Day 245 (15 tendays after planetfall)

 

“Resolved: that the Discovery should resume its Voyage one tenday from tomorrow.” The proposal blinked evilly up at Bingdi from his comconsole.

The council further announced that only those previously registered as Voyagers could vote on this proposal. After all, 5-Russ Minh argued, those not truly committed to the Voyage should have no voice in determining when to resume it.

Bingdi’s specialty was information retrieval and analysis. Even without Luis’s nose for politics, he was concerned at what the voting restrictions might portend. He, of course, had always been registered as a Voyager, and so could vote; he scrolled down to see what he was voting on.

“Whereas, even the materialists agree that contamination from the planet is a serious danger, and that the chance of such contamination increases the longer we spend in association with the planet….”

And there it was, in the neat appendix summarizing the scientific arguments: Bingdi’s own research on Ti Chiu’s suggested decontamination procedures for returning personnel and for planetary material being brought to the ship, being used to justify abandoning the colonists.

His own work.

He’d only been trying to be helpful. He’d done the research originally for Luis, on how to minimize the risks so that the stay could be extended.

Bingdi felt as though he’d written a homework assignment for Ethical Dilemmas about theoretically sacrificing one life to save many, and had it brandished before his eyes as a death warrant for a friend.

Still. There could be no doubt about what the outcome of this vote would be.

No doubt, therefore, which way Bingdi had to vote.

He had to live here, and this ballot wasn’t secret.

He stared at the screen and punched, Yes.

 

Bingdi had never been instructed to trade the double space he had shared with Luis for a single, though normally that was done as soon as a roommate’s change of domicile was duly registered. This had not surprised Bingdi.  It wasn’t that there was suddenly 25% more living space on the ship, though of course there was. Rather, it was that many of the Voyagers and Visitors still clung to the hope that their loved ones among the Outsiders would return to the ship, like Four-Steinman Jael had been forced to do.

Any absence on the planet was only temporary, many people pretended, meriting no disarrangements among the ship-bound majority.

Not so for Bingdi. Bingdi clung to no hope that Luis might ever return, but he did still cling to the room that they’d shared for so long. Which still sometimes smelled faintly of Luis when Bingdi fluffed up the other man’s sleepsheets.

But after he punched in his vote, the sharespace empty of Luis became abruptly unbearable. Bingdi swallowed tears, scrubbed at his face, and rushed out into the corridor.

He ran promptly into that old friend of Hsing’s, Rosa, who burst into sobs herself. No doubt she’d just voted as he had, following the archangel’s heavy hints like the good little angel she was.

But the thing was, Bingdi ran **into** Rosa. Physically into her. And so he felt what her flowing loose white angel’s dress concealed from the eye. Her round, tight abdomen.

Bingdi had had two years of medical training, before the switch from VR anatomy to working on live and hurting humans had appalled and terrified him into changing fields to Information Science.

He stared at Rosa, shocked at what he’d felt. Of all people to do something so anti-social, sweet conventional little Rosa, most obedient of all the rule-following angels of his acquaintance, was the last he would have expected to defy that stringent rule. She and her husband both had HAD their replacement children, so Rosa could not be pregnant. And yet she was.

He didn’t say a word, but she flushed at his stare and said defensively, “The… the Outsiders. They’ll need to be replaced, if they really won’t come back and be angels with us again. And even if they do, some of them have died.”

Which made sense as a change of policy, of course. If the ship was losing a quarter of its population, the remaining three-quarters would be allowed, expected even, to expand the next generation to fill the vacancy.

Except that Bingdi didn’t recall such a change of policy being announced.

Well, it couldn’t affect him, after all. He might not have noticed the announcement; he’d had a lot on his mind.

He put Rosa aside and walked back to his empty double. Being alone with the memories of Luis was better than running into angels.

 

But later. In the cold night later. When he thought it through.

It wasn’t just that Bingdi had not noted the policy change being announced. He might have overlooked it. He wouldn’t have, when Luis was here. But Luis wasn’t here, that was rather the point, and so Bingdi might have overlooked it.

Except—Bingdi had felt Rosa’s hard belly. She had to be about ten tendays along. He wouldn’t have noticed, otherwise; there were signs earlier, of course, but not ones that would have declared themselves so incontrovertibly to someone half-trained.

Rosa was ten tendays along.

And just about twelve tendays back had been Tirza’s baby’s death.

Which had determined Bingdi that no, he would not, could not, change his mind and become an Outsider—and concomitantly, that he must never become a father. Which decision he had implemented, the very next day.

But… the doctor, the nurse, had made no effort to dissuade him from his decision. Which, in retrospect, in the small hours of the night after the angels had held a vote from which the Outsiders and the Visitors had been disenfranchised, was chilling.

Bingdi had had the introductory course in medical ethics; they should have tried to talk him out of it. He hadn’t had his father-child yet; they should have urged him not to do anything permanent until he had.

They hadn’t.

And at the same time, at the very same time, an exemplary angel couple who’d already had both parentchildren was allowed—or ordered—to stop their conceps and conceive a third.

Angels already controlled the ship, simply because they formed the voting majority. An overwhelming majority, with the Outsiders now gone. If they had started to form policies favoring themselves over non-angels…. and now they were stripping non-Voyagers—by definition non-angels—of voting status, even….

We are all angels, Rosa had always proclaimed, radiantly. The distinction between angel and non-angel, according to the angel’s own ideology, did not exist.

She hadn’t been radiant tonight. She’d been crying.

*

 

Some Angels are More Equal than Others. Year 165

 

Bingdi should have seen it coming. He did, really. He’d seen it start, with Rosa’s tears.

It was even logical, in its way, Bingdi analyzed grimly.

Before Hsin Ti Chiu, they were all angels aboard the Discovery. They could be nothing else. Angels who believed that they were travelling in mortal Bliss; fellow travelers, unaware of the grace that was theirs but still travelling in mortal Bliss; and the beloved dead, angels voyaging in perfect and immortal Bliss, and who would be joined in time in Bliss by all those angels living.

Before Hsin Ti Chiu, that was true.

But now there was something else.

Former angels.

Loved ones who’d abandoned the voyage to stay on Hsin Ti Chiu.

Now there were fallen angels, far worse than dead.

Bliss offered rich comfort to believers dying on the ship, and to angels grieving for their dying or dead loved ones. We are all still voyaging together; we’ll soon rejoin in the eternal Voyage to Bliss!

But to those mourning loved ones left on Hsin Ti Chiu, Bliss offered, instead of consolation, a doctrine of eternal separation and of the damnation of the lost. And where there can be no comfort, there must be blame. For that incontestable, inconsolable loss.

And now there were ex-angels, like 4-Steinman, who’d abandoned the voyage for the dirtball, and then returned.

Back to be blamed.

First it was only that Outsiders returning from the planet while the ship was still in orbit discovered that they’d been replaced at their old jobs, which was only logical. They’d been gone, after all, they’d **said** permanently, and the jobs had still needed to be done in their absence. 5-Ross assured them that everything would be adjusted once the Voyage was underway again and things had returned to normal. In the meantime, the Council assigned the returnees to helping to offload the Outsider Stores, and to such unglamorous ship tasks as recycling collection and bacterial counts.

What the Council didn’t tell the returnees was that the adjustment they had in mind was to make the changes permanent. Once the ship was underway, the replacement angels were confirmed in their new positions, however well-qualified any returned Outsider had been previously, and the Outsiders were consigned to necessary but disliked jobs—and to undergo constant supervision by an angel.

4-Steinman complained incredulously and vociferously at the waste of her training and experience when she was told that she was assigned permanently to sort recyclables under the supervision of a twenty-year-old.

She was told, they all were told, “You abandoned the Discovery, abandoned the Voyage; you can’t expect us to trust you again with more responsible posts until you’ve established that you’re truly committed to the ship.”

Next, Bingdi noticed that many angels were shunning the returned Outsiders. And worse than shunning.

It was that Hsing’s friend, again, who showed Bingdi the truth. Rosa had been a shadow of herself after the birth of her second son. Bingdi saw her sometimes slipping quietly through the corridors with a child or three in tow, sometimes with tears slipping silently down her face.

But then one day, she saw 4-Steinman in the snackery and was galvanized.

Afterwards, some angels said that 4-Steinman had started it, that she had pushed the younger woman deliberately or jostled the baby. That wasn’t Bingdi’s impression, but then he’d only turned after the screaming had started. It had seemed to him that 4-Steinman was more confused than aggressive, just lifting her hands to defend herself. Rosa was tearing at the older woman’s face with her nails; she actually drew blood. And what she was screaming—

Well. She had screamed plenty, and it was largely incoherent. They’d finally had to sedate her. The gist of it was that had 4-Steinman been a proper mother, her daughter would have become a proper angel and would not now be lost on the planet. And that Steinman, having raised Hsing wrong and thereby doomed her, didn’t even have the decency to share her fate.

Bingdi himself had forgotten that the two had been so closely related. Hsing hadn’t been Steinman’s motherdaughter, after all; she’d been raised by 4-Liu. But looking back, he could see that 4-Steinman must have been where Hsing had gotten that tendency to flaunt herself. 4-Liu had been a quiet man.

Bingdi, having read a whole trove of Ti Chiu literature since the departure (somehow nothing written on the ship seemed to speak strongly to him at this time), listened to Rosa’s rant with pity at her inadequate vocabulary. She clearly had no invective sufficient to curse Hsing’s mother, and felt the lack acutely. Most of the Ti Chiu swearwords had no meaning to the voyagers, and they hadn’t invented good substitutes. “Outsider!’ Rosa screeched, and she could come up with no worse word.

Bingdi could sympathize with Rosa’s anger, even. Had it been possible to blame 4-Lakshmi, or anyone, for Luis’s decision, it would have been comforting to have done so.

But Bingdi couldn’t. If Luis could have made another choice, he wouldn’t have been Luis, and so Bingdi would still have been bereft of him.

So Bingdi couldn’t take Rosa’s out.

But most of the angels could. That was clear, from the gossip that reached Bingdi. And from the way that many of them openly spurned the returned Outsiders.

 

And then it became policy.

The college was moved to Quad One, and the Warn was made over into Outsider quarters. Any former Outsider not domiciled with a family member in good standing was reassigned there, and the inhabitants were advised that they should restrict themselves to that area except when their work duties called them to other areas of the ship.

Since the lack of welcome elsewhere was expressed by insults, “accidental” jostlings in the corridors, and the occasional thrown piece of recycling, many of the returnees originally living with family retreated in time to the Warn.

When Outsider 5-Fleming, returning from a visit to her Visitor father, was shoved hard enough against the wall to break her nose, the Council issued a statement: “We regret any injuries that may have been incurred, but we can do nothing to dissuade good citizens from expressing, perhaps more forcefully than is strictly needful, opinions which are perfectly natural and in themselves commendable. We remind the Outsiders that strict adherence to the Ship’s regulations and recommendations serves for their protection as well as evidencing their desire to rehabilitate themselves.”

Bingdi checked his Ti Chiu dictionaries. He contemplated the word “caste.” He contemplated the word “ghetto.”

He thought about suggesting yellow armbands, but he wasn’t sure the Council would realize he was being ironic. Besides, they weren’t needed; anyone on the ship knew, or could look up, who had ever registered as an Outsider.

And even who had just been a Visitor.

Some of the angels were starting to heckle those as well.

Still, Bingdi was probably the only non-angel who wasn’t surprised that over one hundred angel women gave birth in the year after leaving the planet—a staggering number.

Even Bingdi was astonished, though, when Visitor 5-Ferris’s fatherdaughter was taken away from him and given to his angel half-sister to raise. That was entirely unprecedented; no one on the ship had ever lost the right to parent their replacement, except in cases of outright criminal misbehavior.

But, the Council proclaimed, taking a four-year-old dirtside had been criminal. It showed, they said, such irresponsibility, such lack of concern for a helpless child’s safety and moral well-being, as to prove 5-Ferris unfit to raise the girl, or any child.

“I wanted to give Iris the chance to see something she’d never see again, even if she was too little to remember it clearly! What father wouldn’t take advantage of such a unique opportunity?” had roared 5-Ferris, aggrieved and confused.

But he was sentenced to the Warn, and his child sent to his sister.

Given that decision, however, it wasn’t surprising when Bingdi eventually observed that no Outsiders had been cleared to reproduce since the Voyage had resumed. Or, when he finally checked, any of the Visitors.

Or, indeed, any obvious non-angels among the Voyagers. Like him.

 _“Or put it another way,”_ Luis had said in a different lifetime, enlisting Bingdi’s concern. _“There’s no way to know who is an angel and who isn’t.”_

Well, now it seemed that there was. If someone was approved to raise a child, they must be an angel.

*

 

Contamination. Year 166.

 

Cooking in quarters had become discouraged. The snackeries, which had once served food for social outings, and as a convenience for the lazy or time-stressed or non-culinary, were now supposed to serve as refectories for everyone. Full meals were served only during designated hours, however, and even then the snackeries offered rather limited fare.

“Noodles again? I’d prefer the rice, please,” Bingdi said politely to the server. He could see it, quite a small tray, steaming behind her main serving line. She gave him a harried look and said. “That’s restricted to archangels, now.”

Bingdi hoped he didn’t gape. “Restricted?”

She looked around quickly. “Just while—just while it’s in short supply.” She set her lips and dished him up some wheat noodles.

Bingdi took his tray contemplatively to a table. How could rice be in short supply? Four hydroponics bays at least were devoted to it.

As Librarian, it should have been easy to find the answer to that question. But it was not. His first tentative query was met by a Council directive to restrict his attention to his own Departmental concerns.

But his Department was information!

That objection, however, was not one he chose to voice to the Council.

Eventually Bingdi observed that one of his mother’s old friends, a semi-retired associate of 4-Liu’s, seemed to have resumed full-time shifts. He invited 4-Wang over one tenthday for tea and (wheat) cookies, and she confirmed, cautiously, that the rice crop seemed to have become infected by some blight. No, not a fungus; something virus-like, but not exactly. Unrecognizable. The rice was withering as soon as it sprouted. Unfortunately the blight was highly contagious, easily transferring to older plants, but on them it was asymptomatic.

Only it was carried from them into the seed, and was activated there by the enzymes involved in sprouting.

“Not recognizable?” Bingdi said carefully. “So… so, not obviously a mutation of something we’ve carried with us all along?”

She looked at him sharply. “No. And it doesn’t help that we’ve lost Yao—” She cut herself off.

Bingdi sipped his tea and refilled hers while he considered that. But the next question was too pressing to be tactfully framed.

Bingdi **liked** rice.

“How—how much of the ship’s rice crop had become infected before we diagnosed the problem, if it was asymptomatic in growing plants?”

4-Wang looked down, swallowing, and didn’t answer.

 

There had been a message early on from the planet, that none of their rice crop was sprouting. Bingdi had read it, his involuntary satisfaction at this further vindication of his decision warring with his cold fear for Lu—for the Outsiders. How could they ever hope to set up a sterile hydroponics system there? Yet if their staple crops wouldn’t grow in that dirt, if they could not, then they would starve. If not at first, then at last.

Bingdi had worried about it. He’d done an innet search on “famine;” the descriptions were unbelievable, and the photos far worse. But the art was the worst. There were some black and white woodcuts by someone named Kollwitz that were worse than the medieval European ones of the Third Horseman. He’d had nightmares, even.

Only in all his worries, Bingdi had never dreamed that their problem could affect **him.**

How could a pathogen from Hsin Ti Chiu ever have made it onto the ship? Bingdi himself had made sure that the Plenary Council was aware of the dangers of contamination from the planet—his warning had been cited when they’d called the election to pull out early! He had made certain to relay to them all the information Ti Chiu had sent on decontamination procedures.

All the information that Ti Chiu had sent…. Bingdi suddenly recalled something Patel had said in the Great Rejoicing. Of late, that speech was being broadcast interminably: in the corridors, in the snackeries, in the Temenos. Bingdi had much of it memorized by now.

_“They did not free us from Earth to doom us to another Earth! That is literalism—scientific fundamentalism—a dreadful mental myopia.”_

Mental myopia. Literalism.

To believe as fact what was, indeed, fact.

Bingdi considered that. He considered, in the light of Patel’s speech, something Luis had once told him: _“Not many young angels are going into dermatology these days, but there are some older ones who do eva. As soon as they’re through the airlocks, they undergo a ritual of purification…. It’s called decontamination. An old material-science theory word with a new meaning.”_

So. If the people of Ti Chiu were, according to the archangels, intrinsically incapable of understanding the true, **spiritual,** dangers of exposure to a planet, then their warnings about physical contaminants were not to be taken literally. That would be mental myopia. Scientific fundamentalism.

The true danger from exposure to a planet must be spiritual.

But it followed from that, then so too must be the procedures to purify someone or something exposed to that dangerous influence. Obviously. The physical procedures recommended by those afflicted by mental myopia would be valueless.  Or symbolic, meriting only symbolic adherence.

Bingdi shoved his chair back and stood up, needing suddenly to move. 4-Wang, who’d been brooding over her teacup, old eyes anxious and unfocused, looked startled. Bingdi walked over and put more water into the heater, as though making a fresh pot of tea had been his intent all along. Back to her, he continued to think.

Had the angels implemented any of the physical decontamination procedures he—his Ti Chiu texts—had recommended? The UV irradiation, the heat sterilization, the chemicals? Or had the angels just—just prayed over returning people and equipment? (The samples taken from New Earth, he knew, had been jettisoned before leaving orbit.)

Bingdi could find out, of course; he could interrogate a returned Outsider about what “decontamination” procedures had actually been followed. If he dared openly approach one. Since they were spiritually contaminated, and might contaminate him.

Bingdi wanted to laugh. Or cry. He did neither. His specialty, after all, was information retrieval and analysis, not drama.

Instead he remembered another story Luis had once told him—about an early scientist forced by a theocracy to recant his published observations, and his defiant final assertion that reality capitulates to no belief. Bingdi whispered, “And still it moves.”

“Pardon?” said 4-Wang. He hadn’t realized that she would hear him.

“Nothing,” Bingdi said, turning with the hot water for their tea. “Nothing.”

*

 

Protectors. Years 168 – 180

 

The brown shorts and starry black sleeve-patch that had once marked eva-men had been adopted by others authorized by the Council to safeguard the ship’s well-being. Which meant, it seemed, the ship’s purity. The first time Bingdi saw a man in brown shorts and a patch swinging a metal pipe and whistling cheerfully, he wondered why a dermatologist would be doing plumbing. And why steel would be used instead of the usual plastex.

Then he saw the pipe in use against an Outsider, and understood exactly why metal, heavy, would be preferred for the task.

The new “protectors” included, it seemed, many of the youthful male angels. In fact, it came eventually to include most of the ship’s thirteen- to sixteen- year- old boys, in that large and unruly cohort conceived between the loss of the Outsiders and the unofficial acknowledgement that the rice crop’s failure had reduced the ship’s carrying capacity.

Bingdi wasn’t certain if the uniform was even used by real eva-men any more. If there were any left still practicing dermatology rather than protecting the ship by punishing the impure.

 

*

 

Protection from Contamination. Years 181-184.

 

The egresses from the Warn had all been blocked off save two corridors, one used as an exit and one as an entrance. Both were now manned checkpoints, and required computer passes and the following of certain protocols.

This was, the Outsiders were told (and somehow everyone in the Warn was now an Outsider, whatever their original registration), both to protect the unsullied angels from contamination by them, and for their own protection from the rightful anger of the angels.

Warn occupants could leave only with a valid computer pass, and were required to undergo Decontamination when they did. This involved stripping, walking through a tunnel that sprayed them first with disinfectant and then with cold water, being dried and irradiated, a cavity search with fingers and metal detectors, then being given a gray smock to don with their curfew timer inset in the left shoulder, ticking down. They were expected to return the smock to Stores before the timer went off. Given what had been done to those who’d managed to jigger the timer, most stopped trying.

On ingress, the smocks were returned to stores and the returning workers were cavity-searched again, then given as much of their pay as they chose to bring in immediately. One twelve-hour work shift earned forty-eight hours worth of rations, or credit towards clothing, medications, or other items on the Materials Approved for Outsiders list.

Since the only food now entering the Warn was that carried by returning workers, since many workers had non-working dependents, and since those who didn’t could trade food on the Warn black market, most chose to take their wages in full at once as food.

Once past the entrance checkpoint, muggings were not unknown. The angels recorded each in full, but did not intervene in any way.

Sometimes the tapes of these muggings were broadcast. “See how Outsiders behave, when free of our restraints,” said 5-Ross Minh and the Archangel Council. “See how incapable they are of angelic cooperation. They were never truly like us.”

In the early years, family members of Outsiders were allowed to visit and bring food, clothing, and other Approved Materials. But those visiting loved ones sometimes found their clearance to leave revoked without notice, and themselves reassigned to the Warn. And no one knew how many, or how frequent, visits would trigger revocation.

Then a visitor was mugged and killed for his food, and the tapes of the incident broadcast to the ship, and the visits mostly stopped.

The Angels were periodically exhorted to rejoice in how well they were being protected from the Outsiders in their midst.

*

 

The Joyous Purification. No Year (what would have been Year 184)

 

6-Ruiz Joy (only he had dropped the Six), new Council Chairman, announced that it had been the laxity of his predecessors that had led to the slide from mortal Bliss—to the loss of favorite foods, to the new diseases, to the shortages.

Had not his elders tolerated the stop at New Earth? Had not they connived at the bleeding away of resources, the damnation of 900 souls, the introduction of contaminants from the new hell?

It would have been better, Joy said righteously, to have killed the erring angels who foolishly wished to leave the ship. Such an act, though perhaps seeming extreme on first view, would have preserved the ship’s mortal Bliss intact, and perhaps even preserved in eternal bliss the souls of those who died in error.

The damned had lost Eternal Bliss, the ship had lost Mortal Bliss, as much by that Council’s weakness and apparent mercy as by the obvious errors of the damned.

Bingdi had to admit, Joy’s arguments were logically consistent.

It was the very young men, boys really, like Rosa’s younger sons, who seemed to Bingdi most to relish brutally enforcing the curfews and the clothing restrictions and the food laws against the Warn-dwellers. It was teens who had finally beaten 4-Steinman to death, and set her bloodied clothes as a warning banner in what had once been the Warn snackery.

Her body had been jettisoned, not recycled.

It was sixteen and seventeen-year-olds who, laughing and jeering, surrounded 5-Ross and the two other surviving members of what Ruiz Joy called the Dirt-lover’s Council. It was they who shoved them down before a barber to have their heads shaved, and they who jostled the older men down to the Warn.

It was the youngest Protectors, their voices lifted in a treble chant of “Bliss! Bliss! Bliss!”, who tore all the clocks from the walls and hammered them to pieces, to be replaced by silent techs with silent tenday counters. Since the voyage was eternal, there was no point in recording how long since it had started, proclaimed Ruiz Joy. That was old-thought. And the year itself, a unit of time imposed by the Old Earth’s irrational period of revolution, was an abomination against right thinking. Tendays, and tens of tendays, were how angels reckoned time.

Only, the shortages didn’t ease, nor did a new cache of rice seed suddenly appear in any of the emptied stores, nor did anyone blinded by that Hsin Ti Chiu virus suddenly exult in the return of light.

It was perhaps three tens of tendays after his ascent to power that Ruiz Joy announced his ultimate purification—the final decontamination of the ship. All those, he said, who had ever left the ship and touched dirt must be purified, along with all who had connived at their defilement, and when that purification had been completed mortal Bliss would return to all the rest.

It was the brown-short boys, armed with their metal pipes, who rousted out the Warn-dwellers and dragged them to the lander’s airlock.

It was they who shoved into the lock as many bodies as could be crammed in with the airlock’s safeties overridden. Overridden, apparently, so that the airlock door would snap shut despite a stray limb or two happening to be in the way: horribly, after the lock had slammed shut two pale fingers and a bare brown foot lay bleeding profusely at the base of the silent steel door.

What was the point of herding them there? The people watching on the monitors in the Temenos murmured in confusion, but faintly. Yes, those people had once ridden the lander to a dirtball’s surface. But there was no lander there now; it had been set adrift, not even salvaged, when the rice blight had been officially named an abomination brought up from New Earth. That airlock was now pointless. Functionless. The cramming of dozens of Warn-dweller into it, likewise pointless, and so too the herding of the other Warn-dwellers into the corridors nearby.

Bingdi stared obediently at the image of the airlock door on the screen, at the bits of bleeding flesh at its base. They all did, everyone in the Temenos. Ruiz Joy announced, his voice ragged with triumph, “They wanted to leave the ship, to go Outside. They shall attain their desire. Now!”

And the airlock’s outer door, the one that would have locked onto the lander’s hatch, was opened. Emptied to vacuum.

After that there was pandemonium, as the brown-shorts shoved and cudgeled their victims into the airlock and vented it, cudgeled and shoved and vented. Desperation gave the Warn-dwellers strength, but long malnutrition had weakened them to the point that well-fed teens could kill them with little effort.

Bingdi didn’t dare turn his eyes aside, aware of the brown-shorts in the room watching for signs of protest, but he registered very little. Not to remember afterwards.

He did recall, quite clearly, 5-Ross Minh begging hoarsely, his face alive with fear, “Kill me! Kill me on the ship! Don’t send me outside to die! Please, kill me!” to the young men with the cudgels. One of them finally shut him up with a blow to the head and dumped him into the airlock, but Bingdi couldn’t tell whether the blow had been fatal or only stunning.

Bingdi really hoped it had been fatal—the man had wanted that so much.

Finally it was over, and the boys shoveled the remaining red-stained bundles into the airlock for a final venting of rubbish. They were red-stained themselves, their neat brown all gory, but they turned to the viewer on the wall and saluted it. Bingdi wondered where they had learned that gesture.

“Bliss!” they shouted in unison.

“Bliss,” Ruiz Joy said softly. “Now we are finally pure, and now the Discovery can travel once more in mortal Bliss as we shall in eternal.”

When he was safe once more in his quarters, Bingdi retched, it seemed, for hours. But no vomiting could eject from his memory the images he had absorbed: 5-Ross Minh’s agonized, desperate pleas. Three pieces of severed flesh, two pink-yellow fingers and one brown foot, before they and everything were trodden to a gory paste.

And one dark and serious young face, shining in exaltation and determination.

Like another face that Bingdi had once known.

 

(”Luis,” Bingdi had said, long ago, back when he was a student, “I can’t… How can you do it? Cut into real people, manipulate their injuries, knowing that what you’re doing right now is causing them pain?  Even if it's to help them?”

(“Hsing said that medicine was the perfect choice for me that way, actually. She quoted some poem…” Luis stopped and concentrated, then quoted triumphantly:

(“The surgeon does not blanch at pain  
His habit is severe  
But tell him that it ceased to feel  
That creature lying there  
And he’ll tell you, Skill is late  
A mightier than he  
Has ministered: there’s no vitality.”

(Luis smiled at his feat of memory, then sobered. “Sometimes—often—you have to hurt to heal. But if you ... if it hurts you too much to do that, then of course you must not force yourself, Bingdi. A lot of people think they’d like to go into medicine, then choose another field instead when they run up against… well, against this. You know that our program has the one of the highest drop-rates at the higher levels, just for this reason. I won’t think worse of you if you feel you don’t want to hurt others, not even to help them. What field are you thinking about switching to, Bingdi?”)

 

That other dark young boy would, apparently, also make an admirable surgeon. But what he was ready to excise, as tumors, as diseased flesh, were fellow human beings.

*

 

Discovery. No Year (what would have been Year 184, had there still been years).

 

This ship turned boys into bloody-handed murderers. And it wouldn’t stop, it could only go on. Get worse. Until finally some critical system failed, and everyone remaining would suffocate or starve—no doubt bludgeoning each other to death to purify their final voyage into death.

Bingdi had read Earth history, back when it was still available to be read. Originally he hadn’t believed very much of what he’d read; it was all too incredible. Increasingly, now, he did.

A fast death was the only mercy left for any of them.

An engineer could no doubt have spotted a dozen ways to kill the ship instantly.  
Blowing up the drive would be the best, no doubt. Or if Bingdi knew how to make explosives powerful enough to breach the hull. But Bingdi was a librarian, not a drive engineer or an explosives expert.

However… decompression would work, provided the safeties sealing off each quad at loss of pressure were overruled. Which was a computer problem. Solvable, in theory. And he didn’t need actually to breach the hull—just to open an airlock, or, better, all the airlocks. From both sides.

Another computer problem. Also, in principle, solvable.

Of course Bingdi couldn’t do any such research on an unsecured console. So he didn’t. He worked on it only in the sharespace that Luis had left to him so long ago, on Luis’s console, now permanently disconnected from the innet.

 

Which made it a problem when Bingdi walked into his space one night and found a geeky brownshort boy seated at Luis’s old console.

The boy smiled at Bingdi, and shadows moved in the corners. Steel flashed.

 

*

 

The Aftermath of a Failed Experiment. Years 153-163

 

There Luis was. In the snackery. And that girl Hsing wasn’t with him, nor was anyone else. Dark rough hair was bent determinedly over a reader. Luis was clearly not looking for him, or for anyone.

Not that Bingdi would say anything that everyone couldn’t hear. That, in fact, everyone wouldn’t hear. Eventually, at least.

Bingdi couldn’t seem to swallow, and his hands were cold. He stammered, “Abou—about last night, Luis….”

Luis looked up, his flashing face closed.

Bingdi cleared his throat and offered, “Everyone was drinking too much. No offense, but, well, I think it was a mistake. I like you better as a friend.”

Luis blushed to the ears and looked down. He gave a tiny nod, and Bingdi saw his shoulders relax. Bingdi escaped before Luis could look up again and see his face.

It wasn’t a lie, not any of it. Bingdi hadn’t actually said that **he’d** drunk too much at last night’s party. He’d stayed achingly sober while Lui—while everyone else got louder and louder, and while Luis kept getting quieter, but more and more relaxed. Bingdi had stayed sober because he wanted to be sure that he could make it good when he finally did it: finally lured a (smiling, stumbling) Luis off into a private cubicle. Staying painfully sober had made it easier for him to drag Luis away from Malik’s and Lena’s pawings, but really Bingdi had stayed sober to ensure he could make it good.

He had practiced and practiced on others, and he knew he could.

And he had. He had. It had been.

Kneeling before Luis, coaxing the last drops from that lovely purple cock, feeling Luis’s thighs trembling and his own hands shaking, stroking Luis’s dark skin just there where it was so tender—

Only then he’d looked up to share his joy, and found the blurred eyes focusing on his face with that look Luis always gave to Ed.

Not judgmental, exactly, or at least not exactly disapproving.

That “it’s all right… but why do you make such a big deal about it?” look.

Bingdi stiffened, seeing that blanked face turned on him. Luis had blinked in turn when Bingdi stopped licking so abruptly. “Bingdi…?”

Bingdi had scrabbled back, and back, and back, his own erection gone. And all his eagerness and painful hopes. Luis had reached out, clumsily, but it wasn’t his clumsiness that mattered.

It was his face. Still that face. Flushed, yes, aroused, but… patient, polite, bemused.

Not alight.

A courteous partner will always try to make sure that the pleasure is reciprocated. All the teens had been taught that much. Bingdi could almost hear the mechanical voice that Luis was listening to. Luis was reaching out, clumsily, **politely** ….

Bingdi had shot to his feet and out the cube door, stumbling and clumsy in his turn, desperate to escape.

 

A mistake, yes, absolutely.

 

Bingdi walked blindly away from the snackery, remembering that flushed, bemused face. Friendship was better than that any day, oh yes.

He hadn’t lied.

 

And Bingdi had had his reward, Luis had continued to jog with Bingdi on the track, had continued to meet with him to study in the library, had continued to sling himself casually over the chair next to Bingdi’s in the snackery.

Unlike how Luis treated, say, Lena, whose doe-eyed, hopeful persistence had eventually earned her an explicit cold shoulder until she finally, after years of rebuffs, gave up.

It was Luis’s idea, or Luis thought it was, that the three male medical students might share a triple rather than taking singles in the Warn. “That way we can study together, see, three heads are better than one, and if we go crazy over an upcoming test we’ll go crazy together, not disturb an innocent outsider.”

(Earlier: “What are you thinking of specializing in, Bingdi?” “I’m considering several options.  What about you?”)

But it was Bingdi who’d argued casually, “If you two agree, I wouldn’t mind keeping our rooms a sex-free zone so we can actually study here. It’s so distracting, trying to read while someone’s getting it off behind the next partition. We can have sex everywhere else in the Warn. Would you two mind that much if we made it a sharespace rule?”

Einstein had shrugged; his girlfriend had a single, and she also hated biology. She’d broken up with Einstein when she walked in on him studying a v-cadaver, but had subsequently relented and taken him back.

Luis… Luis had flashed Bingdi a look of relief.

Not the equal of Bingdi’s own. He knew, of course, that Luis hadn’t taken the pledge but was acting almost as though he had. Just as Luis (and Einstein, and everyone) knew that Bingdi was working his way steadily though half the willing male Fives.

The darker half.

But what Bingdi hoped that no one, especially Luis, had guessed, was that it wasn’t helping.

And then that Hsing got married. To that Navigator who was like an older, colder Luis—rough black hair, smooth dark skin, bright black eyes, brilliance. Bingdi would have been sick at her obtuseness except that he was too busy rejoicing. And maintaining absolute, utter, neutrality about Canaval, about that Hsing, in front of Luis.

Not that it had helped him. Nothing did.

But he had been of some help to Luis, in the years that followed. He knew that he had.

Luis had asked why, implicitly, when he finally realized that Bingdi would follow him no further. Not down onto that dirtball with the soon-to-be-widowed Hsing.

_“But you’ve worked so hard to keep the… the way out open.”_

Bingdi had told Luis the truth; he had even echoed Luis’s own words.

He had **said** : _“If a door opens, you feel it’s your duty to go through it. If a door opens, I unquestioningly close it.”_

Bingdi had practically shouted it: **Your** duty, **your** feelings, **your** door. I’ll close it after you. There is no door for me. No way opening, ever, to what I really want.

It wasn’t Bingdi’s fault that Luis, like the angels, wouldn't hear what he didn’t want to know.

And still Luis had pestered him for a further explanation.

So Bingdi had finally given Luis the other truth, what he would have to settle for.

He had told Luis, he had **told** him, _“I want to live my life in peace. Doing no harm and receiving no harm.”_

True, utterly true.

Since there was nothing else for him to want.

 

*****

 

No Year. The Voyage is Eternal.

 

Silver flashed, and flashed again.

There were bright blossoms of red pain, and the sound of moaning; the rusty smell of blood, and the stink of piss.

Bingdi must have followed Luis into one of his obsessive stints in VR; no one would tolerate this in reality.

The brown blurs were shouting, but Bingdi could no longer make out words.

The next blow was to his head, and the world went black.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The poem fragment that Hsing read Luis, of course, is Emily Dickinson, #396, “There is a Langour of the Life.” Luis is remembering something he’s only heard, so he’s slightly misquoting, and he never saw Dickinson’s capitalization, punctuation, or line breaks. Plus, Hsing is appropriating from the poem, not trying to quote it in context.


End file.
